"Donkerbroek: Tsjusterboksem, 1998–2026". Group exhibition, SIGN, Groningen. 2026.
Tsjusterboksem, 1998-2026
The project began with a question that has followed me throughout my practice: what happens when a sculpture is finished, and what does it mean?Every time I completed a work, I experienced a sense of discomfort. Once a sculpture became fixed and solid, it seemed to lose something essential. It was as if I had given birth to an entity and immediately robbed it of the possibility of existence.
For me, a finished sculpture became a dead sculpture.
After four years of experimenting with location, material, and description, I eventually followed an intuition: to let my sculptures crumble. During this process, it struck me that I had been searching for movement.
Not depicted movement, but actual movement. Disintegration gave life to the things that had previously been frozen. No longer forced to stare into a nonexistent future, the sculpture instead opposed the conditions it had been born into. Location, material, and description became secondary if it remained bound to its psycho-social context.
Neither was it a one-person show. Like the sculpture, I wanted my own face to crumble too. Gain the same cracks that appeared in the clay, and witness my face becoming an eroded landscape of a life lived. Not out of suicidal desire, shame of being alive, or an exhaustion with this world.
But because I wanted to be alive, and belong to the place I was born into.
These latter conditions apply to many, if not most, yet giving in to them denies the possibility of transformation.
The possibility that only exists through being alive.